Wed Mar 26 14:52:52 2008

At 6 o'clock AM, Day of Freedom, 11th of the Month of the Spring
on the Theran calendar Oscereld perished, never to return.

I got some free time in-between projects at my job, so I decided to make a thrown away exploration character. I had several goals in mind none of which was RP or PK
Mostly explored what I wanted and started to turn from an active to passive hoarder, so it was time to delete.

Sorry to all my groupmembers, I pretended to be a newbie just because I felt lazy about gathering or leading a group. After all, to some extent, I was a newbie because I didn't (almost) play for two years.

My greatest achievement is soloing the whistlewood druid.

Thoughts about conjurers:
Great exploration class (especially with my shadowcat familiar), but I don't like the whole approach "balance through annoyance". I'm in favor of making true balance. When something is overpowered, balance it out, not just make it annoying or rare to play (invokers, liches, etc) and pretend that the problem has gone.
Dying to servitors is not fun. Of course, I could die to my servitors much less if I would care about this character more, but still there are cases where you can't really avoid the death. If you conjure a high level servitor and fail to bind it in several tries, prepare for a mob death and an exp hole, you won't have mana for dismissal anyway.
Another bad thing is that conjurers don't have useful elementals to fight underwater. Not sure if it is by design or just an oversight.

Imbecile luminous archon is a joke. It could stand near wounded me for a tick and do nothing. Half of my mob deathes happened when I pressed on even if I failed to conjure a transplendant one (which happened exactly every time I needed one ). You may argue that neutral conjurers shouldn't be great at archons, but let me to say that they aren't great at evil servitors too. Do we really want to have neutral conjurer playable?

And the class is still buggy. But I guess those bugs aren't high priority so I don't expect to see them fixed soon.
However, it was frustrating when your projection comes through a hot room and your metal armor falls to a pickup happy newbie (despite the fact that your real body lies far away).

My favorite nightgaunt spot:

A Deep Sandpit
The sand covers every inch of your body as you sink deeper and deeper into
the ground. Your sense of direction seems to have been left at the edge of
the pit and all points seem to hold more sand.

[Exits: none]

Cool?

I'm curious as to whether all of those nightgaunts were comming from you.

It wasn't a PK char, so I probably sent about 15-20 nightgaunts in my life total (to test stuff ).

I was wondering if you had any observations on familiar agility.

I have a conjurer and took another high cost edge and will likely not make it back up to try that one, but was wondering how it worked out for you and if you would take it again.

The dying to servitors hasn't been too much of a problem for me yet, but I'm not to hero yet and have escaped some by the skin of my teeth. They seem to have a 6th sense and always turn when you least expect them to.

I took some of my edges because I wasn't offered anything better.
I would prefer edges for high level servitors but never got a chance to try them (cost wasn't a problem, I had tons of exp/obs points).

Can't really comment the familiar agility edge, I guess it made my familiar slightly better, but I can't say how much.

As for dying to servitors... it is probably an issue only for neutral and evil conjurers. Goodies are relatively safe.

Hmmm...I was thinking familiar agility didn't really effect your familiar so much, but instead affected you when you were fighting along with your familiar. I.E. if you are fighting and have the familiar join in you will do..something, like dodge some, parry better....not really sure.

This is of course based on the helpfile:

Some conjurers learn to harness their unique bond with their familiar as a special edge in battle, anticipating and avoiding attacks that would strike other such mages through the familiar's senses and agility. This is only possible if master and familiar fight together.


Not really sure, obviously. If you have any logs that you plan on posting, I'd be interested in any that you can remember where you and the familiar were both fighting and you were taking the blows.

Thanks!

Got confused with another familiar edge.
Yes, familiar agility is supposed to make me a better tank, but I can't confirm any visible effect of it. I didn't experiment and compare me fighting solo a certain mob and then me fighting it with my familiar.

One, is that familiar agility has been suggested to help in the same style as EVADE. Think of it as enhanced evade, for conjurers. Don't know if it has any other benefits.

Two, is just how much some of these edges cost. The servitor boosting ones are very expensive, except for the 'student of the inner planes', which is required for all of the elemental study edges. That one cost about the same as Dragonslayer.

Also, make sure you have both the bind and conjuration spell %'s above 85%. Or even 90% for some servitor edges. These are spells that often go up naturally, but for something like the Sword of the Heavens, I had to spam practice conjure angel up to 90% myself as an elf.

Sword of the Heavens: You may learn to petition the purest of Angels.
Adept of Planar Rifts: You may learn to avoid danger and step nimbly among dimensional threads.
Student of Air : You may concentrate your inner-plane studies on Air Elementals.
Student of Earth : You may concentrate your inner-plane studies on Earth Elementals.
Student of Fire : You may concentrate your inner-plane studies on Fire Elementals.
Student of Water : You may concentrate your inner-plane studies on Water Elementals.
Familiar Agility : You can learn to use your familiar to boost your peripheral vision.
Ehren Soul : You can call forth your Ehren Soul and its love of honorable combat.
Eyes in the Back of Your Head: You can be wary for unseen attacks.
Overcome Distortion : You can learn to be resistant to the effects of sensory distortion.
Defensive Withdrawal: You can learn to flee from battle in a more controlled manner, diminishing opportunities for parting blows.
Strong Wrists : Your wrists could be harder than normal to break.
Swiftblade : You can deliver swift, reactive blows with ageless grace.
Remain Conscious : You can train yourself to sometimes remain conscious when others might be knocked out.
Warrior Familiar : You may teach your familiar the intracacies of combat.
Adept of the Inner Planes: You may begin advanced study of the Inner Planes, including the Positive and Negative.
Arcane Scholar : You may fortify the fundamentals of your art, and more readily manipulate magic.
Battlemage Training : You may supplement your magical training with limited martial studies.
Deep Pockets : You can develop deep pockets, capable of carrying more things.
Dragonslayer : You can learn the secrets of the dragonslayers and prey upon the weaknesses of scalykind.
*** Student of the inner planes I picked, and it stood somewhere around here on the cost list

As you can see, all the servitor+ ones were VERY expensive, right at the top of the list. Expect to be saving up for MANY hours to get them, as even with familiar agility on my list it was still another 5 hours of play before the elemental+sword of the heavens ones appeared.

Yhorian

I spend a lot of time saving my edge points (plenty of them, 163 exploration points, for example) and I got angel/archon/bind spells all above 90% (some of them to 100), but still I wasn't offered those high level servitor edges. So I decided phuck it and took a couple utility edges.
Maybe as a neutral neutral conjurer I can't get them at all. Who knows?

Wasn't that expensive.

And they're the pre-req. If you didn't see any student of virtue/vice in your edge list, it's probably 'that align only'.

Edges
Banisher
Warrior Familiar
Warded Familiar
Student of the Inner Planes
Adept of the Inner Planes
Student of Virtue
Student of Wards
Calmed Mind
Battlemage Training
Familiar Agility
Student of Fire

I wasn't offered student of vice though. Maybe this option was closed for me once I got student of virtue.

You need stats in both devil and demon conjuration to get student of Vice, you were probably lacking in one of them at the time.

I know you got a lot of exploring and stuff done, but there are diminishing returns for all edge accumulating methods. Imm exp seems to be the best way to reach these higher tier ones, and it was only with a boost of imm exp that I reached sword of the heavens. I see you scored student of fire and familiar agility, both very heavy edges, are you sure you'd practiced you conjures above 90% before you'd picked these?

If so, then I guess neutrals can't pick 'em!! Kinda bites to be hit by the nerf stick again huh?

I gained student of virtue early.
I promptly practiced evil spells to the same level as good ones (about 80+) but no luck with student of vice.
And yes, I waited a long time before I started to pick random edges like familiar agility. Student of fire was my last picked edge I believe.

Level 25 conjure demon 83%

85 would have been safer, but something tells me anyone is unlikely to be able to pick both student of vice and student of virtue.

I know it's not possible to pick both sword of the heavens and shield of the heavens. Or at least I couldn't manage it with my last neutral good exploration char a few months back.

And thanks for the help, I'll see if I can add some stuff to the wiki over it. GLWYN

Student of Virtue was the first edge I took with this char.
I was level 40 with 109 hours.
conjure angel 78%, conjure archon 79%, lightbind 81%.

Perhaps there is some sort of timer how often you use those servitors. But I actually used demons a lot for ranking, the only servitor I rarely conjured was a devil.

It has been strange for my edges as well.


I was spamming up my conjure angel spell early on and had it at about 86%, where conjure demon was still at around 79. I thought it was odd when I saw student of vice on my list, but not student of virtue, and at first thought it was just more costly in edge points.


Vitue finally showed up, and the only thing I could think of that changed was that I used the angels more since the time that I didn't see it, to when it appeared. Maybe there is a trigger to make it show up based on how long you have had the type of servitos with you in hours, or fought with one in PK, had one turn on you...who knows.

43000 exploration points and 53 quests completed? Must be the wonders of the conjurer. I've never seen numbers that like, not even on Nepenthe's characters. I'd like to know what the secret is to getting so many/much.